Iran is producing explosive mini-submarines DEBKAfile December 20, 2012, 9:05 PM (GMT+02:00) DEBKAfile exclusive: Iranian production lines are turning out a new type of speed mini-submarine customized for combat against the US and other Western navies present in Persian Gulf waters. On the principle of asymmetric warfare, the new pint-sized Iranian submarines are light in weight and able to dart nimbly around large vessels to explode on contact with their floating target. Their pilots are bent on suicide. These mini-subs are designed to complement the app. 2,000 Revolutionary Guards’ explosive speedboats.

It just would not be right for California to finish off 2012 without one more designation as being the worst at something. Our state seems to receive several of these each year: one of the worst legal climates, the state with the worst government, the worst place to do business, and now, we are the #1 “Judicial Hellhole” in the nation. The American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) released its annual list of “Judicial Hellholes” – places where frivolous lawsuits thrive and courts produce uneven rulings that often favor plaintiffs – and California earned the #1 slot.

Unedited Video Further Proves Conservative Assaulted by Michigan Union Member Katie Pavlich Last week conservative activist and comedian Steven Crowder was punched repeatedly in the face by a Michigan union member and threatened with murder in Lansing during violent protests against right-to-work legislation, which was signed into law by Governor Rich Snyder. Since the incident happened, leftist media outlets have accused Crowder of selectively editing video to make the fight look like the fault of a violent union mob rather than himself, who they say started it. They also said Crowder deserved the attacks while failing to condemn the union...

President Barack Obama's job approval rating has risen to 56%, by two percentage points his highest three-day reading since October 2009. Although the president's job approval rating has been in the 50% range for much of the time since his re-election, the new high point this week coincides with the aftermath of the Dec. 14 mass school shootings in Newtown, Conn. The 56% average is for Monday through Wednesday, Dec. 17-19. Obama's job approval had reached 54% during the week prior to the Newtown shootings, but had dropped to 51% from Dec. 11-13, the three days just prior to Dec....

A new poll by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs shows that the vast majority of Israelis are opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. The poll, taken in November, showed that 76% of all Israelis (83% of Israeli Jews) do not believe that a withdrawal to the 1948 armistice lines will bring Israelis a secure peace. The Palestinian Authority has repeatedly declared that it will not compromise on its demand that Israel withdraw from all land liberated in the 1967 Six Day War. In addition, the PA is demanding that Israel compensate it for its losses, and...

As President Obama and Democrats urge Republicans to increase taxes, liberals curiously invoke the name of Ronald Reagan, the ultimate tax-cutting Republican. They insist that even Reagan was willing to compromise with Democrats on tax increases; thus, John Boehner and Republicans should as well. In truth, this is (at best) a false parallel. It is correct that Ronald Reagan occasionally compromised on certain tax increases, as he did in 1982. He did so in exchange for promised spending cuts from Democrats that (not surprisingly) never materialized, to his great regret. Reagan would constantly point back to this broken promise by...

Federal prosecutors say a New Jersey man made threatening phone calls to public officials including Louisiana’s governor and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann. Authorities have charged 27-year-old Ronnie McMillian of Hawthorne, N.J., with two counts of transmitting threats to injure another through interstate commerce. Prosecutors allege McMillian regularly called the offices of public officials and used vulgar language to attack the person’s position on gay rights.

NGO Monitor, which studies the treatment of Israel by supposedly non-affiliated and apolitical volunteer and civic groups, has accused Human Rights Watch (HRW) of once again leveling false charges against Israel. According to NGO Monitor, HRW accused Israel of attacking “journalists” in Gaza during Operation Pillar of Defense, but the charge “is false both legally and factually, and the timing of this release appears to be a cynical attempt to divert attention from many scandals currently plaguing the organization,” NGO Monitor said. "This is yet another example of HRW's systematic lack of credibility and its biased approach to Israel," said...

Any hope that Jon Hammar, the Marine imprisoned in Mexico on a disputed gun charge, might be freed in time for Christmas has apparently been dashed by a terse letter a top Mexican diplomat sent to Hammar’s congresswoman.

It is essential that one understand that the “Modern Liberal” is not simply a liberal who happens to be alive today. I call them “Liberals” only because they typically call themselves Liberals, and I felt that any other word would fail to make clear just how prevalent the ideology is. I inserted the modifier “Modern” to make clear that they are not who they say they are, nor are they what “Liberals” used to be. In fact, the Modern Liberal is as much at war against “classical” liberal values as he is against conservative ones, for mature values are not...

Every once in a while, the wrongdoing by a judge gets significant media attention and the wrongdoing is so egregious that fellow judges feel they have to do what's right for a change. This just happened with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth District. The appellate court found that Judge Royal W. Furgeson was wrong to do what he did to Jeff Baron. Jeff Baron is an Internet pioneer who, at the age of 32, invented a technology in the early days of the Internet to make it easier to register Internet domain names. Jeff quickly became...

DECEMBER 20---A three-time U.S. Olympian whose illustrious running career has included a Nike TV commercial, a swimsuit calendar, and ongoing promotional work for Disney has spent the last year doubling as a $600-an-hour call girl, an astounding secret life that she now regretfully calls a “huge mistake.” Beginning last December, Suzy Favor Hamilton, 44, has worked with one of Las Vegas’s premier escort services, booking scores of “dates” in Sin City and other U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.While Favor Hamilton (seen at right) has used an alias, “Kelly Lundy,” when working as an escort, she inexplicably shared...

A 20-year-old Boston University sophomore and a self-described 'cellist-nerd' brought the Miss Universe crown back to the U.S. for the first time in more than a decade when she won the televised contest on Wednesday. Olivia Culpo beat 88 other beauty queens to take the title from Leila Lopes of Angola during the two-hour competition at the Planet Hollywood casino on the Las Vegas Strip. In a refreshing change, the Miss Universe title, which makes Olivia unequivocally one of the world's most beautiful women, appears to have been bestowed on a girl with a healthy streak of normality. Following the...

Senate majority leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, made his "fiscal cliff" position clear in a press conference today. "We are not going to do anything," said Reid. Reid added, "We are not taking up anything they are working on over there." The top Democrat in the Senate was explaining his inaction on the House plan, the proposal put forward by Republican John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives. Boehner's plan is being referred to as 'Plan B.' "Boehner described his Plan B as a fallback option to prevent a sweeping tax hike when tax cuts from the administration...

The outlook for a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" by Christmas is increasingly grim, though lawmakers and the White House still have hope for a deficit-reduction compromise by the end of the year. Republicans will move forward tonight with a vote to pass House Speaker John Boehner's so-called "Plan B option" – an extension of current tax rates for Americans making up to $1 million a year while replacing some pending automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs with other measures. The step seeks to show Republicans acting to avoid an income tax hike on 99 percent of Americans...

Spoke to Joe Kernan, of CNBC "Kudlow Report," re the unclassified report on the Benghazi tragedy, and I aimed to be clear that the State Department is not at fault (about 9 minutes into the lengthy segment) The Benghazi mission was and continues to be a national security operation for arming, training, funding and transporting Libyan Jihadists from Cyrenaica Province of Libya to Syria to pretend to be the "Free Syrian Army." This is the Obama foreign policy after two years of the Arab Spring -- making common cause with strongmen and hiring gunmen to do the bidding of the...

FOX News White House correspondent Ed Henry asked Carney if the four State Department officials that resigned yesterday were “taking the fall” for President Obama and Hillary Clinton even though they repeatedly said that the “buck” stopped with them. “I’m not sure what you are suggesting, Carney replied. “There were some individuals that did a lot of reporting that turned out to be entirely false, based on the paragraph I just read, Ed.” Carney added testily, ” The facts in the report are the facts.”

Any hope that Jon Hammar, the Marine imprisoned in Mexico on a disputed gun charge, might be freed in time for Christmas has apparently been dashed by a terse letter a top Mexican diplomat sent to Hammar’s congresswoman. The two-page missive from Mexican Ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhan to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who has been aggressively advocating for Hammar's release, leaves little hope of a diplomatic solution. In it, Sarukhan takes a thinly veiled swipe at the U.S., blaming it for gun proliferation south of the border. "As you know well, Mexico has had very stringent gun-control...

BRUSSELS (AP) -- Syria's civil war is increasingly turning into a sectarian conflict pitting majority Sunni rebels against government forces supported by the country's religious and ethnic minorities, a new U.N. human rights report said Thursday.

President Obama spoke with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Saturday, the day the State Department revealed her illness, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday. Pressed at his daily briefing about when Obama learned of Clinton’s illness – her spokesman said on Saturday that she suffered a concussion after falling – Carney dodged and said only that the two spoke Saturday. “I think the State Department has been informing the public about the fact that she was ill and that she fell and the president spoke with the secretary on Saturday, but I don’t have any more information for you,”...

On Dec. 5, the first American, Dutch and German Patriot missiles landed in Turkey. Within hours, three Russian warships had put into Syria’s Tartus port – the Novocherkassk and Saratov landing craft and the MB-304 supply vessel. Aboard were 300 marines. And not only fighting men. They also delivered a fearsome weapon for Assad’s army and a game changer in the Syrian conflict: 24 Iskander 9K720 (NATO codenamed SS-26 Stone) cruise missile systems, designed for theater level conflicts. While NATO unpacked the Patriots in Turkey, a dozen mobile batteries, each carrying a pair of Iskander missiles, were fixed into position...

No, you won’t learn what you’re seeking to learn in the request itself. Don’t be ridiculous. That will take months. What you’ll learn is exactly how much effort the people with a legal duty to service the public’s constitutional right to disclosure of public records will put into failing in that duty while concocting an excuse for that failure. Yesterday, we went to court against Butch Speer, the clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives, and Glenn Koepp, the secretary of the state Senate. Our business there was to secure a writ of mandamus against Speer and Koepp in order...

Secretary Clinton's "Accountability Review Board" (ARB) declared multiple times in its unclassified report that although there were multiple failures in leadership, "management ability," allocation of security resources and communication, the board could not find "reasonable cause" to discipline (or even name) one person in the State Department. The report states that there was a breakdown in communication between Libya and Washington. It confirmed previous testimony given on Capitol Hill that the personnel in Libya did ask for increased security. However, the ARB found that those working at the embassy in Tripoli "did not demonstrate strong and sustained advocacy" for increased...

Change in direction, or political cover? Either way, the Assad regime won’t be happy to hear Vladimir Putin talk about how the impulse for change after 40 years of single-family rule is understandable. At the same time, Putin’s statement earlier today isn’t exactly a reversal of Russian policy, either: Russia realizes changes in Syria are needed but is concerned that the push to unseat President Bashar Assad’s regime could plunge the country even deeper into violence, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.Putin’s assessment came just a week after Russia’s top envoy for Syria was quoted as saying Assad’s forces were...

Down And Out In California By Douglas French 12/20/12 Gas in Vegas is a dollar cheaper a gallon than in the Golden State, or so a friend and recent LA transplant tells me. He went on to say the top tax rate in California is over 13%, while, of course, Nevada has no state income tax. Over dinner at Del Frisco’s, he explained how industries are being ruined by runaway government in his old home state. Nevada would surely benefit from businesses making their escape. Plenty of people are leaving California — nearly 700,000, I read somewhere — however, my...

Moscow residents snap up $1,000 (£615) tickets for an end of the world party being held in a cold-war era bunker, 56 metres underground, on Friday. According to a controversial theory, the ancient Mayan calendar ends 21 December 2012, which some interpret as the end of the world

Obama thanked the Diplomatic Corps for the support offered by their home nations after the Sandy Hook shooting, before rallying the ambassadors to unite against other struggles, such as climate change. “[W]hen you think about the last few days, you’re reminded that there’s a fundamental human response that transcends cultures and transcends borders,” Obama said last night. “And that’s what is represented in this room,” he added recalling the foreign policy efforts of his first term. “At the same time, we’re mindful that we’ve got so much more work to do together,” the president continued, noting ongoing threats from terrorists,...

(CNSNews.com) – Two days after Syrian regime fighter jets bombed a Damascus suburb that is home to 150,000 Palestinians registered by the U.N. as refugees, the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday passed nine Mideast-related resolutions by large majorities – all critical of Israel. The only reference to Syria during the session was to the “occupied Syrian Golan” – the strategic ridge captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War and formally annexed in 1981.

House Democrats on Wednesday pressured Republicans to hold a vote now on a bill that would ban high capacity gun clips like the one used in the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D- Calif., said the GOP leadership should put a bill on the floor by Friday that would limit the size of gun magazines to 10 rounds. Republicans leaders have not publicly responded to Pelosi's demand. Flanked by a crowd of Democratic lawmakers, Pelosi made the statement at a news conference announcing a special House Democratic task force aimed at examining gun violence. Pelosi...

It’s often hard to accept the truth, especially when that truth is scary, when reality seems to offer you no solutions, only poison from which to pick. It’s as with a man I once knew who insisted it couldn’t be proven that smoking was bad for you. He knew better in his heart, but his available choices — giving up cigarettes or accepting the danger of their use —were both emotionally unpalatable to him. Enter the rationalization. We’re seeing the same thing with Republicans in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election. Radio host Sean Hannity, citing changing American demographics, stated...

Members of the Senate and House foreign affairs committees grilled Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides in Congressional hearings Thursday morning. Each lawmaker had their own individual concerns about the State Department’s inadequate security, failure to heed warnings, slow response time, misrepresentations to the public, and all around “grossly inadequate systematic failures” leading up to, and following the events that occurred in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11. Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio was concerned with one revelation in the State Department’s report in particular and he steered his questions accordingly. He said of the...

The media immediately accused the accuser, defaming me and supported the union thugs in intimidating/stifling free speech. This unedited footage REMOVES ALL DOUBT as to what happened that day. Please share to shine a light!

It’s a lucky thing for Tesla Motors shareholders that the U.S. Department of Energy loves the company’s loan applications. Without the hundreds of millions of dollars has received from the federal government this year, the electric-car maker’s financials would be gasping for air as 2012 winds down. Given the ugly state of Tesla’s finances — and the company’s sky-high valuation: almost $4 billion — it will rank among the top candidates in Silicon Valley for a 2013 stock collapse, unless it receives significantly more cash next year. The Palo Alto, Calif., company’s financials are, in fact, in worse shape even...

Maybe Scott Brown will become the Manny Mota of politics â€” the guy who excels at pinch-hitting. After having just lost a statewide election to hold onto the seat he won in a January 2010 special election, Republicans want him back as their nominee if John Kerry gets his expected Secretary of State appointment. And according to a new poll from Bostonâ€™s NPR affiliate WBUR, Brown leads all of the expected Democratic candidates, too (via Sarah Rumpf): WBUR poll of 500 registered voters finds U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is in a strong position should there be a special election to...

After weeks of relative calm, America's "fiscal cliff" drama has now been overtaken by a flurry of proposals, counterproposals and legislative maneuvering. As various ideas have been floated, they have triggered two main reactions among conservatives. One is to insist that if Republicans firmly stand their ground long enough, they will eventually get what they want from President Obama. Another is to side with House Speaker John Boehner and to act as if anybody who rejects any of his proposals is completely detached from reality. If Republicans refuse to back any deal that doesn't preserve all of the Bush-era rates...

Taxes are set to go up by $4.6 trillion on January 1st. That is the law of the land. Yesterday, the official tax scorekeeper of Congress, the Joint Committee on Taxation, released their analysis of Speaker John Boehner’s, R-Ohio, Plan B. According to the JTC, Plan B would cut taxes by $4.1 trillion over ten years. It should come as no surprise that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., whose entire political career has been devoted to enlarging the size and scope of the federal government, is whipping hard against Plan B. “I haven’t seen her work a vote this hard...

There is a New York Times op-ed this morning that is somewhere beyond appalling. It is by Adolph L. Reed Jr., a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Reed writes about the appointment of Rep. Tim Scott to replace the retiring Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Scott, in Reed’s view, is essentially an Uncle Tom because he does not agree with the politics of most black Americans: [Says Reed:] ". . . his politics, like those of the archconservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, are utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans. Mr....

Shards from a Vietcong mine are still embedded in Chuck Hagel’s chest, 44 years after his infantry squad walked into a booby trap in the Vietnam jungle. Scar tissue marks the left side of his face from another mine explosion, barely a month after his first brush with death. “I remember,” Hagel told an interviewer for the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project in 2002, “thinking to myself, you know, if I ever get out of all of this, I am going to do everything I can to assure that war is the last resort that we, a nation, a...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Spurred by a horrific elementary school shooting, President Barack Obama vowed to send Congress new policy proposals for reducing gun violence by January. "This time, the words need to lead to action," Obama said Wednesday. He tasked Vice President Joe Biden with leading an administration-wide effort to create the new recommendations and pledged to push for their implementation without delay. The president, who exerted little political capital on gun control despite a series of mass shootings in his first term, bristled at suggestions that he had been silent on the issue during his first four years in...

I’m going to lay out everything you need to know about the fiscal cliff negotiations. After reading this, you can ignore all of the media’s coverage of this topic as well as various politicians’ announcements pertaining to this subject. All you need to know consists of just one sentence. Politicians are in charge of this issue.These are the same folks who haven’t even produced a budget in four years. The same folks who have run $1+ trillion deficits for four years. The same folks who rarely if ever leave office as a result of their fiscal mistakes. In simple terms,...

Scott Brown of Massachusetts on Wednesday became the first sitting Republican senator to voice support for a federal assault weapons ban after the Newtown, Conn., shootings. Brown failed to win re-election in November, however, and won’t be in Congress to vote on gun legislation. “As a state legislator in Massachusetts, I supported an assault weapons ban thinking other states would follow suit. But unfortunately they have not and innocent people are being killed,” Brown told Massachusetts paper the Republican on Wednesday. “As a result, I support a federal assault weapons ban, perhaps like the legislation we have in Massachusetts."

“What seemed to me to be a problem … is that we basically left our schools open to attack — This is like putting a sign in front of your house that says ‘I really think that it’s a good idea to come and attack me because I don’t believe in guns’ — and that’s exactly what we were trying to avoid,” David Thweatt, Superintendent of Harrold district schools in Texas, said on FOX News this morning. In 2007, according to FOX News, the Harrold, Texas school district made the decision to allow teachers to carry concealed guns at school...

Pelosi: Harry Reid and 'Big Money' Are the Reasons I Didn't Hold Any Votes on Gun Control from 2009 to 2011 John McCormack December 20, 2012 11:09 AM At a press conference in the Capitol on Wednesday, House Democrats lashed out at opponents of new gun control measures. “There are no arguments against doing something,” said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut. “The notion that more Americans, quote unquote, in the words of Governor Perry ‘packing heat’ will make us safer is not founded in reality, facts, or history. It is founded in the fantasy of testosterone-laden individuals who have blood...

Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive I've just learned that Washington, D.C.'s petition for a rehearing of the Parker case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was denied today. This is good news. Readers will recall in this case that the D.C. Circuit overturned the decades-long ban on gun ownership in the nation's capitol on Second Amendment grounds. However, as my colleague Peter Ferrara explained in his National Review Online article following the initial decision in March, it looks very likely that the United States Supreme Court will take the case on appeal. When it does...

ZAVALLA, TX (KTRE) - History Channel's Top Shot third-season winner, Dustin Ellermann, might be a master marksman, but in the wake of the Connecticut shooting that killed twenty-six people last week, he is also voicing his opinion on gun rights. "It is wrong for the government to disarm you and make you a helpless victim where ever you are. Gun safe zones are stupid and foolish and there's some sort of illogical mindset that if we put up zones, that we are safe and that's not true," Ellermann said. "Bad guys are bad no matter what. If someone's bent on...

Congressman Louie Gohmert (R – TX) gave remarks on the House floor Wednesday evening and read an October 2010 interview with then House Minority Leader John Boehner (R – OH) by National Journal’s Major Garrett. The article was written eight days before election, when Republicans took the House from the Democratic majority. Gohmert, does not support the Speaker’s “Plan B” proposal to the White House, as he believes the proposal is a tax hike and more importantly does not offer spending cuts. Gohmert described Boehner’s words in the 2010 interview as “brilliant” and “words of wisdom.” John Boehner’s own words...

A group called the Conservative Action Project has released a letter today calling on House Republicans to vote against Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” if it comes up for a floor vote. The group released a statement along with a stellar list of signatories, headlined appropriately “NO MORE TAXES!!!!!!!!” NO MORE TAXES!!!!!!!!!As leaders of broad based American citizen groups we call upon Republican House Members to vote no on Speaker Boehner’s Tax Hike known as “Plan B.” This tax increase bill is just like the tax increase proposal Nancy Pelosi offered last year on May 23rd. Speaker Boehner, President Obama,...